Inside LabourStart

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains (50 or more) are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 79,267 [78,105] +1,162
French: 6,046 [6,044]
Spanish: 4,660 [4,535] +125
Italian: 3,957 [3,914]
Turkish: 3,209 [3,208]
German: 2,906 [2,847] +59
Norwegian: 2,407 [2,390]
Russian: 1,962 [1,922]
Dutch: 879 [882]
Chinese: 828 [817]
Finnish: 560 [536]
Polish: 313 [314]
Japanese: 300 [262]
Arabic: 299 [299]
Portuguese: 241 [242]
Tagalog: 232 [228]
Farsi: 213 [213]
Hebrew: 207 [211]
Swedish: 178 [179]
Korean 154 [154]
Danish: 143 [144]
Indonesian: 128 [126]
Czech: 89 [89]
Thai: 67
Esperanto: 39
Vietnamese: 12

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9,435 [9,177] +258

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,172 [6,596] +576
Members of LabourStart group: 5,180 [5,102] +78
Like LabourStart page (French): 312 [305]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 102 [102]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 75 [70] – new page launched this month

UnionBook –
Members: 5,530 [5,507]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,317 [1,272]

Union group on Flickr: 724 [721]

Website

Correspondents: 640 [633]

Campaigns: As reported below, we closed two big campaigns this week. I also posted below a summary of the results of our recent Philippines campaign – written by the union there. We had a meeting in the LabourStart office with a representative of cleaners in London and are looking forward to creating a UK-only campaign for them in the next few days. Edd and I have both been working on creating a mobile-friendly version of our campaigns and hope to have results in a few days.

Events: We’ve gone live with this new module – see details below. It’s just one more service we offer to the international labour movement and one more reason to visit LabourStart every day.

Publicity: To our surprise, there was a full page in Neues Deutschland about LabourStart this week. This could not have come at a better time as we strive to raise our profile in Germany.

Books: Sales of the Global Labour Movement book rose by just 44 this week, up to 224. The first book (Campaigning online) was doing better at this point. This week, I plugged the book yet again to 12,000 trade unionists on our UK list, but got a minimal response. We’ve now sorted out a Kindle edition of this book and will begin publicizing it. Last week, we arranged for ‘extended distribution’ of both titles, meaning they should be available in many local bookstores and shops other than Amazon. Meanwhile, it turns out that CreateSpace has been very poor about payments to us — we’ve raised this with them and they’re invesigating. The total sales of both titles should have earned us over £720 — but we’d only received about £211 of that so far.

Fundraising: The head of Geneva-based charity that promotes human rights in the workplace visited our offices last week and we discussed a number of areas of possible joint work and funding. I followed this up with a detailed proposal on Friday.

Correspondents: Edd has identified 128 active correspondents who are not on our mailing list. We’ll be following up, trying to make sure that we can email to all correspondents. In addition, he’s written to all UK correspondents to encourage them to be more active, and to tag their stories by region (Scotland, Wales, etc).

Some highlights:

• Mailing lists growing quickly (100 or more new subscribers this month) include English, French, and Chinese.
• Big growth on social networks (100 or more new ones this month) are our Facebook page and group in English and our Twitter feed in English.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 78,105 [76,648]
French: 6,044 [5,868]
Spanish: 4,535 [4,462]
Italian: 3,914 [3,888]
Turkish: 3,208 [3,116]
German: 2,847 [2,798]
Norwegian: 2,390 [2,369]
Russian: 1,922 [1,951]
Dutch: 882 [885]
Chinese: 817 [717]
Finnish: 536 [548]
Polish: 314 [318]
Arabic: 299 [267]
Japanese: 262 [240]
Portuguese: 242 [246]
Tagalog: 228 [205]
Farsi: 213 [207]
Hebrew: 211 [209]
Swedish: 179 [183]
Korean 154 [150]
Danish: 144 [144]
Indonesian: 126 [116]
Czech: 89 [96]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9,177 [8,881]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 6,596 [6,387]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,102 [4,925]
Like LabourStart page (French): 305 [294]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 102 [96]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 70 [0] – new page launched this month

UnionBook –
Members: 5,507 [5,481]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,272 [1,233]

Union group on Flickr: 721 [720]

Website

Correspondents: 633 [624]

Campaigns: We launched two new campaigns this week, both focussing on Asia. One is in defense of labour rights activist Andy Hall, threatened with jail and a multi-million dollar fine in Thailand. The other is in support of Hong Kong’s dockworkers, on strike for more than a week. We added a graphical link to Reddit which you can see on the Hong Kong campaign — we’ll be working to make this more useful in the next few days.

Helping our friends: We devoted one of our mass mailings in English last week to promoting — for a second time — the IUF’s current campaign targetting Mondelez (Kraft) for its violations of workers rights in Tunisia and Egypt. As a result of that extra push, we helped this turn into the largest online campaign the IUF has ever run. We also gave a special push to Radio Labour last week, timing the launch of the Andy Hall campaign to coincide with an interview they did with him. The result was a record 4,000 listeners to the interview. We also helped three GUFs (ITF, UNI and IndustriALL) as well as our correspondents by sharing with them (the correspondents) details of three new jobs at the GUFs in campaigns and communications.

Our home page: The photo of day/week is no longer a fixed height, as Derek requested. And I’ve publicized the 9 logos Masha prepared for us to correspondents by email, getting a lot of comments. We’ll make a decision soon.

Our second book: A first draft is now ready and we hope to have the book in hand in time for our May Day party in London.

Internationalization: We now have a mailing list in Thai (46 names) and will soon begin mailing to it. We have the beginnings of a LabourStart Facebook page in Hebrew as well.

Fundraising: We did a mailing last Wednesday to 12,867 “power campaigners” — people who have supported at least 5 of our campaigns in the last year. We asked each person to donate $50 to LabourStart and I set myself the fairly randomly-chosen goal of hoping that we’d get 1% of that list to give an average of $50 each — for a total of £4,271. We reached over 95% of that target by this morning, less than five days after the fundraising campaign began. We are also continuing to build for the LabourStart May Day party/fundraiser in London on May 4th. 162 people have said they are either coming (80) or thinking of coming (82).

Publicity: We had a very complimentary article appear in the German newspaper Woz (see details below).

Survey: We sent out a summary of the results of our annual survey of trade union use of the net to all our readers.

Mailing list migration: We’ve nearly completed the migration of our mailing lists from MailChimp to Sendy. Still working on the issue of templates, and for the moment, French and English lists remain on MailChimp, costing us a small fortune every month.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 76,648 [76,322]
French: 5,868 [5,893]
Spanish: 4,462 [4,504]
Italian: 3,888 [3,888]
Turkish: 3,116 [3,116]
German: 2,798 [2,614]
Norwegian: 2,369 [2,369]
Russian: 1,951 [1,951]
Dutch: 885 [885]
Chinese: 717 [716]
Finnish: 548 [546]
Polish: 318 [318]
Arabic: 267 [252]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese: 240 [240]
Hebrew: 209 [208]
Farsi: 207 [207]
Tagalog: 205 [205]
Swedish: 183 [183]
Korean 150 [150]
Danish: 144 [144]
Indonesian : 116 [109]
Czech: 96 [96]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 8,881 [8,659]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 6,387 [6,327]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,925 [4,909]
Like LabourStart page (French): 294 [279]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 96 [92]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,481 [5,440]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,233 [1,194]

Union group on Flickr: 720 [720]

Website

Correspondents: 624 [613]

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 76,322 [75,280]
French: 5,893 [5,922]
Spanish: 4,504 [4,392]
Italian: 3,888 [3,889]
Turkish: 3,116 [3,106]
German: 2,614 [2,586]
Norwegian: 2,369 [2,344]
Russian: 1,951 [1,935]
Dutch: 885 [803]
Chinese: 716 [708]
Finnish: 546 [187]
Polish: 318 [312]
Arabic: 252 [231]
Portuguese: 246 [243]
Japanese: 240 [230]
Hebrew: 208 [208]
Farsi: 207 [206]
Tagalog: 205
Swedish: 183 [183]
Korean 150 [143]
Danish: 144 [144]
Indonesian : 109
Czech: 96

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 8,659 [8,441]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 6,327 [6,098]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,909 [4,884]
Like LabourStart page (French): 279 [267]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 92 [87]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,440 [5,417]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,194 [1,153 ]

Union group on Flickr: 720 [719]

Website

Correspondents: 613 [741]

Campaigns:

• Korea campaign: Still growing, but not yet at 10,000.  We’ll be writing to every PSI affiliate in the next few days to get them on board.
• Mexico campaign: We’ll be doing our bit as part of the IndustriALL-sponsored Week of Action; our campaign should be launched on Monday the 11th in support of Los Mineros; we have the full backing of the United Steelworkers in the USA and Canada on this one.
• UK campaign: We launched our biggest-ever UK-only campaign, in cooperation with the RMT.  They emailed and texted all their members about it, producing a sudden sharp increase in the number of supporters.  This is now up to almost 2,600 supporters.  UK campaigns will now show on the UK news page.
• Australia campaign: Expect a campaign in the next day or two in support of Bob Carnegie.

Languages:

• Tagalog: We’ve had our first two campaigns translated into this Filipino language; we’ll now begin creating newswires and publicizing this.
• Polish: We have now had a couple of campaigns translated and a mailing done to our list.  Six of the 20 Polish people who signed up to our most recent English campaign volunteered to translate campaigns in future — so it looks like we’re reviving our project.
• Czech: Following up on the Polish model, I contacted the small number of Czechs who had signed up for the most recent campaign in English; several of them have volunteered to help get campaigns up in their language.  We have a mailing list of 65 Czech trade unionists, so this can probably grow fairly easily into 100 or more.
• Chinese: We’ve now added the campaigns to the home page in Chinese and Lennon has suggested a number of changes to improve the page.  The number of Chinese supporters for our most recent campaign has grown considerably thanks to Lennon’s efforts.
• Korean: Our first campaign to get more than a handful of Korean responses has meant that we finally have a small, but growing, Korean mailing list.
• Vietnamese: It’s been a while since we’ve had a campaign appear in Vietnamese, but we’ve gotten the latest one translated and hope to begin growing a base of supporters in this language.
• Japanese: Mac has resumed translations — and publicity — so the Korea campaign is available in this language and has had some significant support in Japan.
• Indonesian: We’ve now added the campaigns to the home page in this language too.  All our campaigns are now showing on their appropriate home pages — if we have campaigns in that language.  Otherwise, the English campaigns are usually shown.
• Portuguese: We were able to get the latest campaign up and mailing out thanks to the PSI staffer in South Africa who has volunteered to help with this very important global language.
• Finnish: We’ll have our first Finnish language campaign next week – the Mexico campaign, which targets a Finnish employer.

Annual survey on trade union use of the net: We’re going to launch this one soon, have collected some very good suggestions from senior correspondents and others.

Mailing lists: We continue the transition from MailChimp (very expensive) to Sendy (very cheap).  All lists except for English and French have been moved over.  We need to work on issues like templates and segmentation, but are on the case.

Inactive correspondents: We’ve seen a large drop in the number of correspondents we’re showing because we have one-by-one been contacting, and then dropping, those who are inactive.  We may be down to 450 by the time we’re done.

LabourStart in Numbers: See my report this week — we haven’t seen spectacular growth anywhere, but all our Asian language lists have grown in recent days.

Security: Some of the pages on our campaigns site were exposing some email addresses of supporters – these are now password-protected or in the process of becoming password-protected.

Book [1]: We now have a Kindle edition of our campaigns book — we’ll begin publicizing this shortly.  Sales of the book remain strong; we’ve sold just under 500 copies in 5 weeks.

Book [2]: I completed the first draft of a book for Union Communication Services entitled “Making Unions Stronger – Using the Internet Better”.  A second draft is being sent off tomorrow.  Thanks to Edd and Derek for reading the whole thing through.

Fundraising: Not a great response from the GUFs and others we approached recently.  Today I’ll do a mailing to our “power users” — people who support our campaigns all the time, and will know how to value our work.  I need the help of all of you to raise funds to sustain our ever-growing campaigning.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Key developments:

• We’ve moved from MailChimp to Sendy for nearly all our lists now.
• We now have 28 mailing list languages.
• 20 of those lists have 100 or more subscribers.  We are currently mailing to all 20 of those lists.
• The 8 small lists are Indonesian, Czech, Esperanto, Bulgarian, Greek, Creole, Vietnamese and Tagalog.
• The number of correspondents has dropped dramatically (308 so far) as we get rid of the completely inactive ones.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 103,324 [104,515]

1. English: 75,280 [75,213]
2. French: 5,922 [5,932]
3. Spanish: 4,392 [4,356]
4. Italian: 3,889 [3,879]
5. Turkish: 3,106 [3,111]
6. German: 2,586 [2,551]
7. Norwegian: 2,344 [2,333]
8. Russian: 1,935 [1,949]
9. Dutch: 803 [781]
10. Chinese: 708 [629]
11. Polish: 312 [310]
12. Portuguese: 243 [243]
13. Arabic: 231 [184]
14. Japanese: 230 [ 209]
15. Hebrew: 208 [208]
16. Farsi: 206 [201]
17. Finnish: 187 [186]
18. Swedish: 183 [185]
19. Danish: 144 [146]
20. Korean 143 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,417 [5,389]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 6,098 [5,877]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,884 [4,849]
Like LabourStart page (French): 267 [245]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 87 [74]

Twitter followers –
English: 8,441 [8,115]

Union group on Flickr: 719 [718]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,153 [1,114]

Website

Correspondents: 741 [1,049]
Site visits: 597,018 [599,459]

Campaigns book: Andy is working on a translation into French.  The Kindle edition should go live today.  Sales are now well over 400.  Two parts of the book are about to be reprinted in Social Policy magazine whose editor, Wade Rathke, the founder of ACORN, loved the book.

Campaigns: We launched new campaigns in support of workers in the Philippines and El Salvador.  We closed down the Mexico and China campaigns.

ActNOW DIY: Made a lot of progress on this – hopefully will have something to show before the month is up.

Newswires: We have working newswires in RSS format now for all regions – Europe, Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Central America, the Caribbean, South America and the Middle East.  A number of new unions have signed up to use the newswires – we’ve been writing to local and branch unions, especially in the UK.

Correspondents: Some – a small number – of the inactive ones are coming back asking for passwords.  We’ve now written individually to every inactive correspondent and will gradually begin deleting those who are inactive and don’t respond.  A couple of new correspondents have come on board, from Finland and Canada this week.

Talks: Eric spoke to Southend-on-Sea Labour Party on Saturday; this week, on Thursday, Edd speaks at the Unions 21 event in London.

Public appearances in the UK: We’ll be represented at three upcoming UK-based events.  On 19.1, I’ll be speaking at the Southend Labour Party. On 24.1, Edd will speak at the Unions 21 tech seminar. And on 13-14 March, we’re organizing a panel at the E-Campaigning Forum in Oxford.

Campaigns: We’re about to launch two new ones today – on El Salvador and the Philippines.  These are our first new campaigns in nearly 6 weeks — it has been a very quiet season.  As reported below, we now have the campaigns newswire working correctly in 19 languages, in both JavaScript and RSS versions – please make sure to promote this in your country.

Book: Sales have reached 377.  Let’s all push hard to get that number up to 500 over the next few days.  We were briefly an Amazon.co.uk best-seller, hitting the top 1,000 books they were selling, and reaching number 2 in our category.  A Kindle edition is coming soon, and we’re starting to think about doing another book.  Meanwhile, I expect to complete my book for UCS by the end of January – the working title is  Making Unions Stronger – Using The Internet Better.

Labour Newswire: We’ve pushed our newswires aggressively to UK unions, and it’s bearing fruit.  We had 40 UK sites listed, that dropped down to 20 after Edd removed all the dead wood, and now we’re back up to 28. You can see the up-to-date list of all 302 sites using our newswire here.

Today in Labour History: We now have 11 people adding content to this; almost every day, there is something on our front page in English.   (And more things coming soon.)

Inactive correspondents: Edd has gone through the 500 or so correspondents who’ve not been active, writing individually to each one, and giving support (such as new passwords) where needed.  In a few weeks, we’ll be deleting those who are showing no interest in continuing.

Upcoming global solidarity conferences: I’ve finally heard (today) from a colleague in Germany about the possibility of a conference in Berlin in May 2014; I’ll be following up.  Derek has been in discussions with people in Vancouver about a conference there in late 2014.

Fund-raising: We’ve gotten generous donations from two unions in the USA (United Steelworkers and the Amalgamated Transportation Union) and hoping for more.  We’ve sent out a few copies of the campaigns book to donors who have given £1,000 or more in the last couple of years.